The Skirt Strategy

It's really a very clever move, when you think about it. And loaded with ironies.

The two nominees to federal appellate court, blocked by Democrats during Bush's first term, who have now been renominated and endorsed by a party-line Judiciary Committee vote, setting the stage for a showdown over Democrats' determination to filibuster, are both women. One of them, Associate Justice Janice Rogers Brown of the California Supreme Court, the nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for DC -- which the L.A. Times has called "the triple-A farm team for the Supreme Court" -- is African-American, the daughter of Alabama sharecroppers.

Both are extremely conservative. Priscilla Richman Owen is a "protege of Bush confident Karl Rove, who engineered her 1994 election to the Texas Supreme Court." She has opposed the "judicial bypass" written into Texas law that allows a minor, in special circumstances, to get a judge's permission to obtain an abortion without parental notification. And she has handed down rulings that directly benefit her big-business campaign contributors. Brown holds rather Clarence Thomas-like views, bending over backwards to avoid any whiff of political correctness, obsequious towards the business establishment and harshly Darwinian towards its footsoldiers and aspirants. As the New York Times wrote in 1993:

[S]he has praised the infamous Lochner line of cases, in which the Supreme Court, from 1905 to 1937, struck down worker health and safety laws as infringing on the rights of business. . . .

In one case, her court ordered a rental car company to stop its supervisor from calling Hispanic employees by racial epithets. Justice Brown dissented, arguing that doing so violated the company's free speech rights.

Last year, her court upheld a $10,000 award for emotional distress to a black woman who had been refused an apartment because of her race. Justice Brown, the sole dissenter, argued that the agency involved had no power to award the damages.

But she's black, and a woman. Not only are these constituencies traditionally claimed by the Democratic Party, but opposition to Brown's nomination will be portrayed by Republicans as racist and sexist -- or, more convincingly, as ripping the equal-opportunity mask off of naked left-wing ideology. As Outside the Beltway observes drily, "That the GOP has decided to implement the rule change with Brown, a black woman, is likely not a coincidence."

The irony is that this opportunistic ideological war is shattering so many glass ceilings. We now have a black woman Secretary of State (whose qualifications even her enemies can't impugn), trumping Bill Clinton's appointment of a mere woman. Republicans have taken political correctness and thrown it back in Democrats' faces, with nominees who are politically-correct in their demographic characteristics but proudly politically-incorrect in their views. With this tactic, the Republicans can use race and gender to pretend they alone are so enlightened as to be blind to race and gender. In doing so, they win minority and female recruits simply by portraying political conservatism as the road to unparalleled reward and individual success. In its own way, it's a sneaky affirmative-action program.

- amba